KM 1112 – Melbourne: Premium camping and a world record

Take temperatures between 10 and 15°C during daytime, even less at night, an icy wind, a grey sky and the occasional downpour and you’ve got all the ingredients that can screw up your stay in Melbourne. Four layer of clothing during daytime and two layers of sleeping bags at night just weren’t exactly the way we had imagined Australia.
Besides the not-so-friendly weather Melbourne was, ahm, nice. Good shopping opportunities, a relaxed feeling to it, nice downtown area, everything quite, well, nice. Probably a great place to live, however, as a tourist you’re kind of missing the big highlights that for example Sydney offers with the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge.
Of course that’s not to say, Melbourne sucked. When it wasn’t raining (sometimes we even had some sun!), it was nice really strolling around downtown and also especially walking down Brunswick Street, a cool, sort of bohemian area, checking out the cool (and sometimes weird) clothing stores and book stores, bars, cafés as well as stores for “Seriously Weird Shit” (and a guitar shop from Heaven!!), along with equally cool and more often weird people.
Also a highlight was the Melbourne Museum with exhibitions about Melbourne’s history, some famous Australian racehorse, about the human body and brain and about all the nice little eight-legged, fuzzy, deadly creatures that make Australia such a unique place and honestly scared the shit out of us. Maybe sounds like I’m being ironic, telling you a museum was a highlight of a supposedly cool city like Melbourne, but it actually was a great way to spend an afternoon, especially with the shitty weather outside.
Oh, and who could forget, probably the biggest highlight off them all: We were there, right there and then at Federation Square, right in the middle of the action, when thousands Melbournians set out to set a new world record – a world record in number of people dribbling basketballs at the same time… Seriously, we’re considering cancelling the rest of our trip because it just doesn’t get any better than that ;-)
Talking about Federation Square: It’s not only the heart of Melbourne, a picturesque spot and a great place to people-watch, it also offers supreme opportunities to do some camping pretty much downtown as downtown can: When we arrived in Melbourne, it was Sunday evening, rainy, cold, the tourist info on Federation Square was already closed and we just didn’t feel like doing any more driving that day looking around for a camping spot. So we just parked right there, at parking spot next to the road, about 200m away from Federation Square and stayed there for the night. It was free, it didn’t take any searching and it was pretty much the Melbourne equivalent of going to New York and camping next to Times Square. Who cool is that?! :-)
While in Melbourne, we also got ourselves some company in the van: As our campervan can fit one more person, we thought it’d be fun to find somebody to come along and do a part of the trip together (and also a great way to have another person to share the costs of the trip). So after posting our offer in hostels and online, we met with some people that wanted to come (it almost felt like for once we were at the other end of a job interview) and finally decided on a nice girl from the german-speaking part of Italy that we immediately hit it off with.
So with Andrea as our “reinforcement” we’re off to check out if the Great Ocean Road actually is as great as its name suggests.